The Promised Testing Rant

[omorka]

Mr. Interlocutor: So, why do we have an extensive testing system in the first place? Especially here in Texas - we can't blame our tests on No Child Sinister Buttock; our system predates the federal program, which is in fact based at least in part on the Texas ""success story".

Member of the Educational profession: Well, the original justification for the testing systems as they were debated by the state legislatures that enacted them was that students were being graduated from high schools (in Texas and elsewhere) who were functionally illiterate and unable to do basic arithmetic. This caused a major outcry back in the late '70s and '80s, fed by the publication of A Nation At Risk, during which the students were told repeatedly that they were lazy bums. Instead of questioning whether teachers were adequately trained and of good quality to begin with, or inspecting the curricula (with the exception of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which did do a major exploration of curriculum standards in the decade), they decided that the kids weren't trying hard enough and that teachers were trying to do as little as possible to get by. A number of state legislatures passed laws instituting what were at the time pretty honestly called functional literacy exams as graduation requirements. (The same issues in the '80s also resulted in a resurgence in the Back-to-Basics movement and a strong push for Phonics-Only reading instruction, but that's beyond the scope of this conversation.)

I: But that doesn't sound so bad. It doesn't seem too unreasonable to expect a high school graduate to be able to read, write, and calculate, does it?

ME: No, of course not. But if the coursework required to obtain a diploma didn't ensure that, isn't the obvious solution to fix the coursework? (That was what the '70s excellence-in-education movement was about. Being more or less sensible, it died, of course.) The combined professional judgment of twenty-four high school teachers (and however many middle and elementary school teachers) is going to be more accurate than a single test score.

I: But then how were all the illiterates getting gout of school with diplomas in the first place?

ME: Well, at the time schools were penalized - that is, they lost funding - when students dropped out, when a student was retained a grade, and when students did not re-enroll between two school years. (The first two of those are still true.) The school system is not structured in such a way that one can effectively have 20-year-old juniors or seniors and 14-year-old frosh both in the same school building. So, in order for the schools not to lose money, a number of students were given diplomas simply to get them out of there - diplomas that were little more than certificates of attendance.

I: How did those students even get to high school?

ME: Social promotion, mostly. Throughout the '60s and '70s it was considered harmful to a student's self-esteem to be labeled "failing," and grossly detrimental to his or her socialization to be in a group other than his or her physiological and chronological peers. In order to avoid irreparably damaging kids, students were handed on to the next grade no matter what they had learned, or failed to learn. To make matters even worse, it was also common during that same era not to have a strict definition of what a grade's content was and what a student needed to do to show he or she had mastered it. Some schools even based a grade's content on the interests of the students rather than any sort of set curriculum. Prior to that time, while there had been set curricula, for the most part they were set by the textbooks the schools were using, and thus varied from school to school. So, it wasn't always clear to a teacher what he or she was supposed to be teaching, other than the simple level of "algebra" or, worse, "chapter six." There was no professional discussion of overarching themes and underlying goals, with a few exceptions (like the "new math" movement). This was the origin of the standards movement.

I: Okay, so the standards movement set the standards for these new tests, right?

ME: Actually, a number of people (including myself) have called the high-stakes testing movement the evil twin of the authentic standards movement. We, as a profession, need to have a comprehensive map of where the kids have been, where they are now, and where they are going. We also need to know what skills we are assured that they have when they get to us, and what skills we assure their next teacher they will have when they leave. This requires both standards and assessment. The issue is that it requires authentic standards and authentic assessment. This has nothing to do with large-scale high-stakes testing. A lack of mastery on a single test may tell us as much about a kid's home life or health as it does about his or her knowledge and skills; similarly, a score that does indicate mastery may be the result of good test-taking skills - or dumb luck.

I: But surely it's not possible to really have standards if you don't test them!

Me: Of course, but if the standards are well-written and coherent, and if all the teachers are constantly assessing those standards using multiple authentic methods of assessment - tests, quizzes, projects, essays, and other assignments - then one big year-end test doesn't give us any new information. If one must have large-scale standardized tests, nine-weeks content tests would be better both as summative assessments and as diagnostic assessments.

I: And what if the kids don't meet the standards?

ME: If they fail to demonstrate minimal mastery of the content, then they don't pass the course/grade level.

I: So you're actually against social promotion.

ME: Based on my experiences both as a student and as a teacher, I believe that students need to be with their intellectual peers, and with students who can effectively serve as intellectual role-models. Chronological age has nothing to do with it. Some kids are simply not prepared, for one reason or another, to cover the K-12 curriculum in thirteen years. This is a fact of the universe. However, contrary to the beliefs of some of my colleagues, this does not imply that they will never be capable of honest-to-Goddess 12th-grade work; it just means they may require 15 or 16 years to get to it. Ideally, I'd like for the educational system to recognize that fact up front, and not stigmatize it; in practice, we need to start dealing with the fact that not all students learn at the same rate, and that we need to differentiate our instruction in order to accommodate different learning paces.

ME again: At this point, I should admit my bias - I'm not really saying this for the benefit of the low-level kids. I just happen to think it will benefit them. If No Child is Left Behind, then no child is ever sent ahead, either. A primary reason I dislike social promotion is that it comes from the same mindset that thinks accelerating a gifted kid is bad; if a kid arrives at school able to read, print, add, subtract, and sit still for ten minutes at a time, what good is sitting in kindergarten going to do him or her? (I'm convinced that I'd have been much better off academically if I'd gone directly from first grade to third grade.) Acknowledging that some kids can finish the K-12 curriculum in less than 13 years goes right along with the idea that some need more.

I: Okay, so retention isn't always a bad thing. But what's wrong with testing? Isn't it another net to catch kids who might need another year? Can't we do everything we just said and test, too?

ME: Quite a few things. First of all, some kids simply don't test well - they get test anxiety and freeze up. A high-stakes test is never going to give you an accurate reading on what that kid can actually do. Secondly, we as teachers lose an entire day's worth of instructional time, and another day's worth of prep time that would be better spent planning lessons and grading, for every high-stakes test day. In a state like Texas, that adds up to over a month of instructional time just in the middle-school and high school years alone. Thirdly, because the tests are punitive for schools and school districts, the administrators persist in asking us to spend time on test preparation at the expense of the curriculum (you know, the one we just spent all that time writing standards for). In a state where the test tests the curriculum standards, this is absurd - if we teach what we're supposed to be teaching, then we're teaching what will be on the test, and isolated drill makes no damned sense at all. If, on the other hand, the tests are not standards-based - if they are the old functional literacy tests, or their slightly more rigorous children, the minimal skills tests - then they shouldn't require preparation; prepping for them directly is cheating the intent of the test. If you're teaching a high school course, and your students can't pass a minimal skills test, then something went bad wrong several grades below you and the student should have been retained or remediated back there. Finally, the formats of several of the tests are subtly but measurably discriminatory. Then we have the issue of what is done with the tests and their scores afterwards, which is a political issue in its own right, and gets into the whole vouchers mess.

I: Oooh, yeah. So what's the fix?

ME: There isn't a quick and easy one. The biggest step is to attract people with better intellectual skills of their own to the teaching profession, and keep them there. Finding a way to motivate kids who currently see little value in education would also be a big advance. Restructuring so that students who can accelerate or who need to slow down can do so without stigma will help a lot. Finally, getting authentic standards and effective assessment in every classroom will eliminate a lot of the uncertainty that the tests are supposed to take care of. If the government needs some way to assess the schools, actual inspections and observations, combined with a portfolio system, will give them all the accountability they need without high-stakes testing, and it won't really cost any more, although it will require trained and mobile state personnel who can make useful observations - ones that schools can actually use to improve, instead of merely punitive ones.

I: So what happened today?

ME: Well, yesterday we got the usual "go go testing" talk during the faculty meeting - except that it was phrased (by our North API - the coordinating principal was out taking care of her husband, who recently had a heart attack) completely in terms of how he expected to have to be disappointed in how badly we would behave as teachers: not reading our testing manuals, not picking up our stuff on time, not covering possible test-related displays in our classrooms, and so on. He also went on about how we needed to be a "well-oiled machine" on test days. Very motivational. :rolleyes:

Then, this morning, the CP was back - and she wanted to micromanage the testing over the intercom. So we got started at 8:30 instead of 8:00 because she wouldn't shut up and let us get on with it. For what it's worth, the kids were very patient and well-behaved during all of this.

We were supposed to send the kids to overflow testing at 11:30, so at 11:00 I asked the kids how many though they would not be finished by 11:30. All but three of them raised their hands. My classroom was not unique - so the admins decided to extend the testing period.

Now, there's an obvious problem with this. What time is it again?

At 12:15 one of the kids asked me when they were going to get to go to lunch. I had to tell him I didn't know. At 12:15, with four lunch periods, each 27 minutes long, when school dismisses at 2:25, this is kinda a problem.

The 10 kids who still weren't finished at 12:25 were sent to overflow testing, which promptly overflowed both LGIs (large-group instruction rooms - basically like college lecture rooms) and both libraries. I only had 5 kids show up for 5th period, even though I was late getting back from returning my test items. The CP refused to ring bells for the lunch schedule, instead doing it all by intercom (she wOulD NOt sHUT UP!), and instead of just hustling through an abbreviated four-lunch schedule (which would have been bad enough), she tried to squeeze in a fifth lunch shift solely for the testing students.

I ended up playing Hangman with my fourth-period students because I never got enough back from testing to actually have a class.

I didn't get a planning period today at all.

There were kids testing until 4:30. They had to run three late buses to take them home.

I got nothing useful done all day.



And to top it all off, the Secretary of Education called me a terrorist for trying to do my job and do right by the kids.

Some days you just wish you'd called in sick, ne?

Comments

[gentlyepigrams]

Having gone through the British educational system for a couple of years in the 80s, I've done the really high-stakes test (two four-hour tests that certify your last two years of learning). I test well, so I did all right. But I'm not in favor of high-stakes testing after that.

The answer to all this is money. Since education is a public good, paid for by taxes, there is an unfortunate and real upper limit to how much money will be pumped into the system to pay for the best educational practices, which ain't cheap. Vouchers will fix this problem only to the extent that other people are willing to subsidize private (mostly religious) schools for reasons of their own (mostly religious).

Or maybe my stint student teaching just made me totally cynical about school administration at local, state, and national levels.